this lasts on forever. It lives, like the human soul,
in the body of humanity--associated with much that is inferior, and
hampered by many hindrances--but it never sinks into nothingness, and
never fails to find new and noble work in creations of permanent and
memorable excellence. Heaven forbid that I should seem to cover, even
with a counterpane of courtesy, exhibitions of deliberate immorality.
Happily this sort of thing is not common, and although it has hardly
been practised by any one who, without a strain of meaning can be
associated with the profession of acting, yet public censure, not
active enough to repress the evil, is ever ready to pass a sweeping
condemnation on the stage which harbors it. Our cause is a good one.
We go forth, armed with the luminous panoply which genius has forged
for us, to do battle with dulness, with coarseness, with apathy,
with every form of vice and evil. In every human heart there gleams
a bright reflection of this shining armor. The stage has no lights or
shadows that are not lights of life and shadows of the heart. To each
human consciousness it appeals in alternating mirth and sadness, and
will not be denied. Err it must, for it is human; but, being human, it
must endure. The love of acting is inherent in our nature. Watch your
children play, and you will see that almost their first conscious
effort is to act and to imitate. It is an instinct, and you can no
more repress it than you can extinguish thought. When this instinct
of all is developed by cultivation in the few, it becomes a wonderful
art, priceless to civilization in the solace it yields, the thought it
generates, the refinement it inspires. Some of its latest achievements
are not unworthy of their grandest predecessors. Some of its youngest
devotees are at least as proud of its glories and as anxious to
preserve them as any who have gone before. Theirs is a glorious
heritage! You honor it. They have a noble but a difficult, and
sometimes a disheartening, task. You encourage it. And no word of
kindly interest or criticism dropped in the public ear from friendly
lips goes unregarded or is unfertile of good. The universal study of
Shakespeare in our public schools is a splendid sign of the departure
of prejudice, and all criticism is welcome; but it is acting chiefly
that can open to others, with any spark of Shakespeare's mind, the
means of illuminating the world. Only the theatre can realize to us
in a life-like way w